Love and Death in Kathmandu: A Strange Tale of Royal Murder

Part One

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.

Romeo and Juliet

William Shakespeare

Prologue

In the Nepalese hill village of Dolakha, a tolling bell calls frightened townsfolk to their famous temple. An old man with high cheekbones and a white, whiskery goatee joins the crowd pressing through the ancient, narrow streets.

As he reaches the temple, one of Nepal’s holiest for 550 years, he finds villagers bowing and praying with a quiet desperation. The god, a black, wedge-shaped rock, is sweating again. The old man wonders what upheaval awaits his poor country this time.

When Domber Bahadur Shrestha was a boy, the village elders told him that when the idol sweated, something bad always happened. It sweated, they recalled, shortly before the 1934 earthquake that killed 8519 people. No one had bothered writing such things down, though, and so the curious child, lucky to be literate in a country where few were, decided he would become the record keeper of these bouts of perspiration.

The boy grew to be a schoolteacher and public servant. During his lifetime, the idol has sweated eight times – and eight times disaster has followed. From catastrophic landslides to the fall of dictatorships and the death of kings, it has foreseen them all.

The temple priest takes a swab from the sweating idol and sends it to the royal palace, eighty kilometres away in the nation’s capital, Kathmandu. The king must always be informed when the idol sweats. His Majesty will send a sacrificial he-goat and an emissary to perform the correct puja (ritual worship). But they are slow in coming.

News of Dolakha’s weeping idol is not the only menacing portent filtering into the royal bureaucracy. Across the tiny mountain kingdom there is a sense of unease. From the royal family’s ancestral palace at Gorkha comes a report of water falling from the sky on a clear night. It is construed as an omen directed at the king. In a dark-wooden house opposite the old Kathmandu palace, a perfect ring of pimples circles the face of the child goddess, Kumari. A sure sign the deity is about to leave the girl’s body. Then in late May, Saturn moves into a new constellation and astrologers predict disturbances. An earthquake, perhaps.

The signs are there. The palace has people to handle such things. There should be no surprises. But no one foresees what happens next.

On 1 June 2001, the heir to the throne, the impeccable Crown Prince Dipendra, picks up several guns and blows his family away.

*   *   *

It is a story delivered to us in Australia by the breakfast-table newspapers, a curiosity from a faraway land. A demigod dons military fatigues and kills his parents – King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya – along with his brother, sister and a collection of aunts and uncles, before turning the gun on himself. He is declared king while lying in a coma, as the world speculates on why he did it. The most consistent story to emerge centres on a rift between the queen and the twenty-nine-year-old crown prince over the woman he loved, an arrestingly beautiful aristocrat named Devyani Rana.

Three days later, the homicidal crown prince is dead. We are glued to the story, watching as the Himalayan kingdom wedged between China and India struggles to survive.

Eleven days after the massacre, we are struck by reports of a death ritual performed for the late King Birendra. As part of the elaborate katto ceremony reserved for Hindu monarchs, a Brahmin priest representing the dead king defiles himself by eating meat laced with ash from Birendra’s funeral pyre. The Brahmin, dressed in heavy gold brocade and wearing a replica of the king’s plumed crown, then mounts a lavishly adorned elephant and crosses the sacred Bagmati River, ensuring a safe passage into heaven for Birendra’s spirit. The old priest, having lost his caste – his position in the strict Hindu social system – is then expected to leave the Kathmandu Valley, forced into exile for the rest of his life.

Three days later, a similar ceremony is held for the murderous Crown Prince Dipendra. But this time, the elephant will only leave under a barrage of rotten fruit and a beating that leaves blood streaming down its face. It is an inauspicious sign for Dipendra’s soul.

Sitting in a kitchen in Sydney, it is this image that persuades us to come to Nepal. To discover both the madness and the magic in which the massacre has taken place, to understand what happened that dark night, and to immerse ourselves in this enigmatic land.

Aside from the crime, we find ourselves captivated by the idea of Nepal. We know little about the country, but it is a place we’ve always wanted to visit. What we do know has been pieced together from friends’ trekking snaps, documentaries of Mount Everest conquests, news reports of an emerging guerilla war in the hills, and stories of the courage and ferocity of the Gurkha soldiers.

The rest is a mystery. That’s part of the allure. We imagine a mystical, vibrant land of ancient tradition. The more we read in the massacre’s wake, so it seems to be. A nation where living gods and goddesses, untouchables and kings are guided by superstition and karma. Where each man’s fate is written at birth on his forehead.

*   *   *

Finding a patch of sunlight out of the shadow of the old Kathmandu palace, we take a seat on the worn temple step. It is chilly, despite the sun, but from here we can watch the monkeys as they lope across the palace rooftop.

Around us, the sprawling Durbar Square is going about its business. Where sunshine lights the winter cobblestones between temples, ragged women nurse their babies, and bored rickshaw drivers loll in empty carriages. A saddhu (Hindu holy man) wanders over, all saffron robes, long white beard and skinny legs. He gestures to us with an empty begging tin: ‘You want photo?’ We are soon distracted by the soldier marching past in heavy boots. Across the square, a circle of old women in vibrant saris chant and sing.

It is January 2002. It has taken us six months to quit our newspaper and magazine jobs and come to Nepal. We flew in only a few days ago, but already realise there is so much about the country we need to understand before we can begin to delve into the massacre: the protocol and traditions of the royal Shah dynasty; the long, capricious history between Crown Prince Dipendra’s ancestors (the Shahs) and those of his lover (the Ranas); the culture of royal violence; and an age-old belief system, fiercely protected and so very different from our own. This is a country where the twenty-first and fourteenth centuries come together in a strange, brilliant patchwork, where belief systems are often more important than facts.

Few Nepalis we meet believe their crown prince is guilty. There is an air of quiet resignation in Kathmandu, both in the few who believe the apparent evidence, and among the majority who cling to what they know in their hearts. Their beloved Crown Prince Dipendra, they tell us, simply cannot have killed his parents. Indeed, in the world’s only Hindu kingdom, many believe he was a living incarnation of the god Vishnu.

We soon understand that, more than just one violent night in the royal palace, this story is an intricate web of family feuds, mysticism, conspiracy theories and fact. It is also a story of place. We decide we will begin by exploring Kathmandu and Nepal itself. From there our journey will spiral inwards to the heart: a portrait of Crown Prince Dipendra, his love affair with Devyani Rana, and the events that may yet lead to the end of a dynasty.

Chapter 1

The Goddess and the King

Our first week in Kathmandu was, for the most part, spent in a crush of wide-eyed wonder as we struggled to contain the onslaught to our senses. We found ourselves on a wonderful, eccentric ride in a city where cows ruled the streets, and baby marijuana plants sprouted by the side of the road.

On dirty pavements, cross-legged women sat bundled in brilliant crimsons. They sold fried fish, pieces of coconut, chewing gum and nylon bras. Or they would read your palm, bargaining to the last rupee with a smile, while above them fluorescent lights announced supermarkets and department stores – the face of new Kathmandu – all white, bright and fixed price.

Bumping through the city’s pock-marked streets in the back of a cab, we passed a motorcycle dealership advertising ‘Honda – the family bike’. And it was, too. Middle-class families of Dad, Mum, two kids and a baby would zip by on their motorbike, nonchalantly dodging wheezing tuk-tuks and tinny buses belching black smoke.

Billboards spruiked cigarettes ‘Inspired by Nepal’ and bargain-price health care – ‘Now you can afford open heart surgery and angioplasty’ – while lepers, widows and small children lined New Road, tugging at your clothes with withered and filthy fingers in the hope of a few rupees.

In the bazaars of old Kathmandu’s warren of rickety lanes, the pace slowed. We looked up to admire the handsome shutters and elegant woodwork of the old-style houses. Women and children hung out of windows to watch the activity in the alley below, where pregnant hessian sacks spilled lentils and rice, and jostled with a spectrum of silk and pashmina. Neat piles of offerings from that morning’s puja dotted the path, and the sizzle of frying mustard-seed oil stung our nostrils over the spicy warmth of incense. And just when we were completely transported, a family bike would honk its horn a metre behind and we’d jump out of its way, right back into the twenty-first century.

It was here in the heart of ancient Kathmandu, by the old royal palace, that our journey really began.

*   *   *

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ our guide, Rama, addressed us, although there were only two of us, ‘this is the home of the child goddess Kumari.’

We were standing outside a dark little doorway in Durbar Square, finishing Rama’s hour-long tour through the maze of temples surrounding the old durbar (palace). This final doorway was the part we’d been most looking forward to. It was the reason we’d really taken his tour: a chance to glimpse the living goddess in one of the exquisite carved bay windows overhead.

Behind the dark-wood lattice we could hear children playing and a TV blaring. It was a surprise to learn the goddess had access to Hindi soap operas.

‘Unfortunately,’ Rama continued, ‘because you came too late in the afternoon, it is not now possible to see the Kumari. You will have to come back another day.’

We were disappointed, finding it enchanting that somewhere inside lived a young girl worshipped as a deity. That the king of Nepal was chief among her worshippers made it all the more so.

The Kumari and the king go way back. No one can agree exactly when their relationship began, nor quite how it happened, but one of the more popular tales is this: in the early eighteenth century, the goddess Taleju and the then King of Kathmandu, Jaya Prakash Malla, would regularly meet at the palace to play dice. When the king began to lust after the goddess, however, she got angry. She informed him she would no longer meet with him directly, but would appear in the form of a virgin girl whom he could worship.

Whether or not Jaya Prakash Malla thus instituted the royal worship of the Kumari, or whether it was another Malla king a century or so earlier, didn’t much matter. As protective deity of the Kathmandu Valley, she has always been an important goddess for any king to have on side. Which could be why, when he found his kingdom under increasing threat through the 1750s, King Jaya Prakash offered the royal Kumari a most extravagant gift. He initiated an annual chariot festival in her honour and built her the house we were now standing outside. Perhaps it wasn’t enough.

By the autumn of 1768, the people of the Kathmandu Valley had been under siege for the better part of twenty years. Their harassers were hill men from the tiny state of Gorkha – poor, hard peasants whose military fame would later spread across the world as the British Army’s favourite mercenaries, the Gurkhas. The Gorkha leader, the upstart king Prithwi Narayan Shah, had another factor working for him. Moving through the crowded, narrow streets of Kathmandu was a secret army of his Brahmin spies, spreading a feeling of inevitability about the Shah king’s ultimate victory.

The Brahmins whispered the story of how the saint Goraknath had promised the valley to the Shah king; and that years earlier, when Prithwi Narayan Shah had taken tika (a red mark placed on the forehead) from the child goddess Kumari, she had handed him a lotus flower, the valley’s symbol. The goddess had thus already promised Kathmandu to the Shah dynasty.

That autumn, as the Shah king’s army came ever closer to the walls of the kingdom, the spies informed Prithwi Narayan Shah that the festival of Indra Jatra was to be celebrated as usual. Rakshi, the local rice spirit, would be flowing freely.

What happened next remains a blur of history. With the people of Kathmandu dragging the Kumari’s chariot through the streets amid much merrymaking, the Shah king’s troops entered the city with little resistance. After some twenty-five years of continuous warfare, Kathmandu suddenly had a new king. With a ceremonial throne already set up in Durbar Square, Prithwi Narayan Shah’s first act as monarch was to sit in it and have the Kumari put her reddened finger to the centre of his forehead, conferring on him the right to rule the city.

Ever since, Prithwi Narayan Shah’s descendants have ruled Nepal (as the Kathmandu Valley was then known), and have maintained a little girl as the Kumari. And every year, the king bows before her to take tika as she confirms his right to rule. Or not to rule, as we later learned from an historian, Professor Tulsi Ram Vaidya.

The professor told us of a strange performance his father had witnessed between the Kumari and King Tribhuvan, grandfather of the slain King Birendra. It was the autumn of 1954 and King Tribhuvan had gone to take tika from the goddess.

‘But goddess Kumari did not give it,’ explained Professor Vaidya. ‘So her assistants said to her: "The king has come. Please, give him tika." Goddess Kumari just folded her arms.

‘So then King Tribhuvan told his son Mahendra, the crown prince, to go forward. Goddess Kumari smiled, ready to give the tika. At that, Mahendra moved aside and asked his father to take it. But when King Tribhuvan went forward, goddess Kumari again folded her arms. She would not give him the tika. This happened two or three times.

‘At last, goddess Kumari started weeping, looking at the face of the king. King Tribhuvan also felt uneasy. He withdrew, offered his golden coin, and bowed down to the feet of goddess Kumari. He told his son to take the tika. About six months later, Tribhuvan died, and Mahendra became king.’

The Kumari caretaker, Jujubai Shakya, told us he had seen signs before King Mahendra died, too. Every day, for seven days before his death, a dead snake appeared in the doorway of the Kumari’s bedroom, blood oozing from its mouth.

It was also Jujubai who saw the strange circle of pimples on the face of the Kumari before the royal family massacre. ‘It means our queen did not have her own face when she died,’ he explained. Indeed, Queen Aishwarya had suffered some of the most horrific injuries in the massacre. At her funeral she wore the haunting, open-eyed mask of a china doll to hide where half her face had been blown off.

We later returned to the Kumari Ghar (house) with our guide Rama, to get a glimpse of the child goddess. Through the narrow doorway, we stepped into a sun-drenched courtyard, in the centre of which, spindly trees shaded a stone idol and mandala (circular design symbolising the universe). Around it was built the Kumari’s three-storey house.

Rama called up in Nepali to the empty windows. We could just make out an old woman in the shadows. A minute passed. We followed Rama’s instructions to drop a few rupees in the donation box, and another minute went by.

Then, up in the window, a little girl in red appeared. She looked about five years old. Her tiny face wore a streak of heavy black eyeliner that stretched out to her temples. We pressed our palms together and bowed our heads in namaste (a traditional Hindu greeting). The child smiled, flicked us a shy wave, and bounced away.

And that was it.

It left us wanting more. Knowing how goddesses were impossible to pin down for a meeting, however, we decided to try the next best thing. We would find an ex-goddess.

*   *   *

Our friend Pankaj rang to say he had found a former royal Kumari. We were invited, he said, to visit Rashmila Shakya at her family home in the heart of old Kathmandu. Before hanging up, Pankaj offered two pieces of advice: we should bring Rashmila a gift (having been a goddess for eight years, she was apparently not used to visitors turning up empty-handed), and we weren’t to mention the subject of marriage.

We already knew the M word was a sore point with Kumaris. There was a strong belief that marrying an ex-goddess would lead to a man’s early death. One explanation we’d read was that, during sex, snakes would emerge from her vagina to devour the man. Of course, it could be more that a former goddess was such high maintenance she sent the husband to an early pyre.

*   *   *

Rashmila sat in an old-style window, a glassless frame of dark, carved wood. The noise of children playing echoed up from the narrow street. She wore a simple black kurta suruwal (long tunic and matching loose trousers) and just a touch of eyeliner. To her side tested a large portrait of her when she had been a goddess – regal and unsmiling under elaborate gold headdress and heavy red brocade, her forehead painted red around a golden third eye.

Rashmila was just an ordinary four-year-old girl when, in 1984, the presiding royal Kumari showed signs that her reign was coming to an end. The caretaker alerted the royal priest, who in turn informed King Birendra. The royal astrologer was called on to decide an auspicious day for the selection of a new Kumari, and the search began.

While the Kumari is a Hindu goddess, only girls from the Newar Buddhist caste of Shakya are eligible for the role. And, for the goddess’s spirit to enter her, the girl must be pure. She can have no blemishes, no serious illness in her past, and she must have suffered no loss of blood.

Rashmila’s mother was approached by the caretaker, Jujubai, and asked to present her daughter as a candidate. Rashmila didn’t remember much of what happened next. Or if she did, she wasn’t telling. The selection process is mysterious and guarded.

According to Dr Michael Allen, an anthropologist who studied Kumaris, a committee that included the royal priest and royal astrologer would then have examined Rashmila and the other candidates at the old palace. They were looking for thirty-two perfections found in goddesses.

It’s an improbable list of features. On their own, some of the simpler attributes seem logical – well-proportioned feet and nails, broad shoulders, long arms, white teeth with no gaps, and a pure and robust body – but some of the rarer qualities create a rather odd picture. She must have the feet and hands of a duck, a chest like a lion, the thighs of a deer, a neck like a conch shell and the eyelashes of a cow. Her body should be shaped like a banyan tree, her head round with a cone-shaped top. Her complexion should be golden, her cheeks like a lion’s, her tongue small, moist and sensitive, and her voice ‘clear and soft like a duck’s’.

None of this matters, however, if the little girl’s horoscope is not compatible with that of the king. Once Rashmila was found to have all thirty-two perfections, the royal astrologer compared her chart with King Birendra’s. It was favourable.

She still had to pass one final test, the darkest and most secret stage of the process. On the evening of the eighth day of the Dashain festival, the four-year-old was taken to a small courtyard at the old royal palace, Hanuman Dhoka. Throughout the country, goats, buffaloes and chickens were being sacrificed to various bloodthirsty goddesses, in keeping with the traditions of Dashain. In the Hanuman Dhoka courtyard, 108 buffaloes had been killed and their blood offered to Taleju, the goddess whom the Kumari is said to personify.

It’s not clear what happened next. The courtyard would have been dark and bloody, with the freshly severed buffalo heads illuminated only by lighted wicks. It was a scene designed to terrify an ordinary child, but not the earthly representative of a bloodthirsty goddess. Rashmila must have greeted the carnage with regal composure. That night, the spirit of the goddess entered her body. She had become a